Former HRD minister feels sex education corrupts kids

Murli Manohar Joshi urges parents to withdraw their children from CBSE schools, where sex education is imparted, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jul 15, 2007, 24:53:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Former Human Resource Development minister Murli Manohar Joshi on Saturday exhorted parents to withdraw their children from CBSE schools, where sex education was being taught.

He also called for a national campaign to close down CBSE, if the government fails to withdraw its Adolescence Education Programme.

At a rally organised against sex education by the Siksha Bachao Andolan Samiti on Saturday, Joshi said educating children from 5 to 14 years of age about sex was wrong and it was necessary to stop it.

He viewed that sex education will transform student teacher relation into that of a man and a woman. “I think the government wants to import the western culture of sexual relation between student relation to India,” he said.

In this context, he said, parents should meet teachers and principals and tell them: “Agar sex education bandh nahi kiya, to na tum rahoge nahin tumara school (If you don’t stop teaching sex education neither will you remain nor will your school)”.

He said introduction of sex education was what multinationals did to create the desire for sex among teenagers to sell their products. “It is not sex education. It is education to sell condoms,” he alleged.

He cited the recent controversy over India’s HIV/AIDS figures falling from 57 lakh to 27 lakh. “These companies were behind the inflated figures,” he said. All speakers agreed with his point.

Joshi also feared that the HRD ministry’s sex education programme was aimed at breaking India’s family system and its ethos.

“I don’t know what Human Resource Development minister (read Arjun Singh) wants to do to this country. No religion will allow this. Not even Marxist. Only an anarchist can do that,” he alleged. He added that there was no need for a separate curriculum on sex education because “there is enough knowledge on sex and reproductive body functions in Biology taught in schools”.

Finding leaders from religious groups like Jamiat-Islami-Hind and leaders from Church at podium, Joshi called for a national alliance of all religious groups for a campaign to stop introduction of sex education.

“Even in Parliament, I found leaders cutting across political parties objecting to sex education programme,” he said, while asking the samiti to form a national level committee for the campaign.

The samiti has already written to teachers in Delhi stating that teaching sex education can land them in trouble.

The parents can book them for outraging the modesty of a woman or dishonouring a person carrying punishment upto two years, says a letter written by Dina Nath Batra, national convenor of the samiti.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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